I had moved to Japan from my
home country of Indonesia, where
I was accustomed to a different re-
search and training culture. When
I pursued my master’s degree there,
my research was much less struc-
tured and I only went to my adviser
when I had questions or prob-
lems. That presented its own set of
issues—for example, when my grad-
uation deadline crept up on me, I
hadn’t yet completed everything I
wanted to. Still, it was what I was
used to.
In Japan, I was surprised to learn
that I was expected to update my
advisers on a weekly basis. They
didn’t tell me what details to report.
So, while I was coming up with my
research questions and study de-
sign, I wrote brief updates about
any new ideas or experimental
plans I had in mind. But seeing the
progress my lab mates were reporting, I soon felt pressure
to communicate something more substantive. That spurred
me to dive into experimental work faster than I should have.
I started to do experiments each week, usually frantically
putting them together during the 2 or 3 days leading up to
my weekly email. The experiments worked, but I had a nag-
ging feeling I was getting lucky and that eventually I’d be
discovered for being sloppy. During one group meeting, my
adviser scolded a lab member for wasting time, energy, and
money on a poorly designed experiment. The same could be
said for much of my work up to that point, I knew. Some-
thing needed to change.
I realized my earliest reports, during the time I’d spent
planning my project, could be a model—one that I could
build and expand on. I hadn’t gone into much detail in those
emails because ideas and plans didn’t strike me as significant
accomplishments. But after stumbling through experiment
after experiment, I came to see that there was real value in
laying out detailed plans.
I wasn’t sure how my advisers
would respond if I reverted to the
experimental design stage, but I
decided it was worth a try. I spent
the weeks that followed reading
papers and thinking about the big
picture goals of my project. I was
nervous when I wrote my first
email update listing all the papers
I’d read and ideas I’d explored—but
lacking concrete data. To my relief,
my advisers didn’t object. After one
report, which focused on papers
I’d combed to figure out the right
method for one experimental step,
one of my advisers reached out to
another professor who had relevant
expertise to ask for advice. That
helped me make a final decision
on my method more quickly than I
would have on my own.
Expanding my idea of progress
helped me feel more productive
and gave me the intellectual space to explore topics more
deeply. My research became more efficient and I ran into
fewer dead ends. I also realized that writing out detailed
ideas and plans in the weekly updates provided a valuable
opportunity to articulate them for myself, which helped me
approach my advisers more confidently and engage in more
productive discussions.
Over time, I began to see the updates not as a burden,
but as the tool they are intended to be—to gradually build
the chapters of my research story, and to spur constructive
feedback from mentors along the way.
On my last day in my Ph.D. lab, I did something I never
could have foreseen during the first 6 months: I thanked my
professors for the lab tradition of weekly progress reports. It
helped me collect the small stones I ultimately used to con-
struct the stairs to my Ph.D. j
Pijar Religia is a visiting researcher at Osaka University. Do you have an
interesting career story to share? Send it to [email protected].
“It helped me collect the small
stones that I ultimately used
to construct the stairs to my Ph.D.”
My weekly assignment
D
uring my early months of graduate school, I struggled with a weekly task: sitting down at my
computer and writing an update for my advisers. More often than not, I felt stuck. I didn’t know
what to write because I didn’t think I had done enough work worth sharing. My stress level sky-
rocketed, and I started to do experiments just for the sake of having something to report. It was
the perfect recipe for making no progress. But by the end of my program, I realized the weekly
updates didn’t need to be packed with data and accomplishments. Instead, they could serve as a
tool to refine my thinking and get the feedback I needed. I was glad my advisers required them.
By Pijar Religia
ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER
1290 3 DECEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6572 science.org SCIENCE
WORKING LIFE